Book Image

AWS Penetration Testing

By : Jonathan Helmus
Book Image

AWS Penetration Testing

By: Jonathan Helmus

Overview of this book

Cloud security has always been treated as the highest priority by AWS while designing a robust cloud infrastructure. AWS has now extended its support to allow users and security experts to perform penetration tests on its environment. This has not only revealed a number of loopholes and brought vulnerable points in their existing system to the fore, but has also opened up opportunities for organizations to build a secure cloud environment. This book teaches you how to perform penetration tests in a controlled AWS environment. You'll begin by performing security assessments of major AWS resources such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3, Amazon API Gateway, and AWS Lambda. Throughout the course of this book, you'll also learn about specific tests such as exploiting applications, testing permissions flaws, and discovering weak policies. Moving on, you'll discover how to establish private-cloud access through backdoor Lambda functions. As you advance, you'll explore the no-go areas where users can’t make changes due to vendor restrictions and find out how you can avoid being flagged to AWS in these cases. Finally, this book will take you through tips and tricks for securing your cloud environment in a professional way. By the end of this penetration testing book, you'll have become well-versed in a variety of ethical hacking techniques for securing your AWS environment against modern cyber threats.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Setting Up AWS and Pentesting Environments
4
Section 2: Pentesting the Cloud – Exploiting AWS
12
Section 3: Lessons Learned – Report Writing, Staying within Scope, and Continued Learning

Stress testing

There are policies built around Amazon customers who plan on using some type of high-volume testing to test against the reliability and durability of their systems, networks, and products. In this case, often customers may want to ensure that web servers hosted on an EC2 instance can withstand large amounts of traffic. Stress testing, which can also at times be called load testing, or gameplay testing, can also ensure that if traffic becomes too much for the web server, the traffic is then redirected by a load balancer. For a high-level view of load balancing, please refer to Figure 11.4.

Why stress test?

As mentioned, we execute a stress test to ensure that the target environment can take on the high amount of traffic that may be expected while the system is in production.

Important note

A production server will typically be accessible on the web and will ensure large amounts of traffic from legitimate and non-legitimate sources.

Load testing, or stress...